The present technology relates to an information processing apparatus, an information processing method, and a program, and more particularly, to an information processing apparatus, an information processing method, and a program capable of reducing the data amount of an image while suppressing deterioration in the image quality of a portion of an image which a user is interested in.
In recent years, a virtual slide system has been suggested as a method of executing pathological diagnoses efficiently and quickly (for example, see Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2010-061678).
In the virtual slide system, images obtained by photographing samples of pathological tissues with a microscope are stored in a storage and the images are read from the storage and are displayed on a monitor, as necessary. Pathologists (doctors who give pathological diagnoses) browse (view) the images displayed on the monitor and give pathological diagnoses.
However, since the field of view of the microscope is narrow, a sample of a pathological tissue is photographed with the microscope, being shifted little by little. Therefore, the image of one sample has billion pixels to ten billion pixels.
Accordingly, since the data amount of a sample image is massive, it is necessary to provide a method of appropriately reducing the data amount.
As the method of reducing the data amount of the sample images, there is a method of evaluating the image qualities of images compressed at respective compression ratios and compressing the images at appropriate compression ratios based on the evaluation result (for example, see Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2005-288157).